May 2013

How to Draw a Detailed Coffee Maker Illustration

Often even more advanced Photoshop users shy away from illustration in Photoshop, despite it having some very robust drawing tools at your disposal.

Often times the issue is the lack of a clear guide to help you through the process. Well today our resident expert Andrei Marius will show you how to create a super clean coffee maker illustration using some of Photoshop’s advanced drawing tools.

Despite this being a long and in depth tutorial, each step is broken down into clear step by step instructions, so whatever your level of design expertise you can follow along and learn some great techniques in the process.

Clean design couldn’t be more on trend right now, some being able to create slick illustrations like this one will allow you to create incredible custom icons and graphics to support your (or your client’s) clean website design.

Today, WordPress celebrates its tenth anniversary and we wanted to take a moment to congratulate them. Ten years is a hefty amount of time by any standard—to put it in web terms, WordPress is older than Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Pinterest, and of course Envato.
WordPress enthusiasts are celebrating worldwide with more than 600 meetups organised in cities across the globe. Our own Japh Thomson (Editor of Wptuts+ and all-around WordPress Evangelist) organised the meetup in Tasmania, Australia. To commemorate the occasion, he’s also put together a timeline of major releases of WordPress over on Wptuts+.

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This is a great technique which is commonly used in magazines, newspapers and newsletters. This tutorial will show you how to add a drop cap to paragraphs, which simple enlarges the first letter of a paragraph. It’s defiantly a good technique worth knowing how to do if you are a Graphic Designer its essential and certainly something, which you will need to do at your design career.

For web developers, pre-existing resources can be a major timesaver, or a major headache, depending on the quality of code, ease of use, and number of bugs.
One of the great things about the web these days is the availability of popular free web builders, free resources and plugins, and pre-made templates available.

However, it can be a bit difficult to sort through and find the best resources. So, to save you some time and supercharge your web development workflow, I’ve gathered up some jQuery resources for you.

Included are some of the most commonly needed resources, such as responsive grids, sliders, scrolling, and forms.

Mini AJAX Upload Form

In this tutorial we are going to create an AJAX file upload form, that will let visitors upload files from their browsers with drag/drop or by selecting them individually.

This collection of free PSDs contains some really cool vintage and retro web elements, for you to use in your website designs. You’ll find everything from icons to patterns and badges! Add them in your resources collection andif you’re looking for more vintage inspiration, don’t forget to check out these 10 Vintage Photoshop Tutorials and 10 Must Have Free Retro Fonts.

A beautiful collection of posters which use great typography. This is a great inspirational blog post, which is a great resource for when your creating your very own typography posters. Please feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below.

This is nice short handy quick tip when you’re working on a print project, and need to find out how many words are within poster or magazine. It may be something you may not of known is an available feature in indesign, but something which I’m more than certain you will take will utilize at some point in your design career.

Members Area Tutorial: Recreate a High-End Photo Shoot On a Limited Budget

We’re going to cover some incredibly practical, basic tips that you can apply in order to create your own cost-effective photo manipulations from scratch. Not everyone has access to professional photography studios, and today you’ll learn how you can product high-end looking results on a very limited budget.

This includes everything from correctly setting up a photo shoot, to moving into Photoshop and covering post-production essentials. You’ll work with lighting, detail removal, color correction and photo manipulation.

Final Outcome:

Digital Painting Lesson: Paint an Arm Using Anatomy Basics

Today we have an expert lesson for you in digital painting. It’s very important for an artist to be familiar with human anatomy. Even if you’re not a regular digital painter, digital painting and drawing techniques can come in handy for tweaking photo manipulation work, adding depth to illustrations and understanding light and shadow.

There are a lot of books that can help you in this topic, but they’re usually created for medical students and seem to be too complicated for the rest of us. I’ll show you how to paint an anatomically correct arm – one of hardest parts to learn – without any specialist knowledge.

Let’s get started!

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A collection of 25 business cards, which are free to download for commercial and non-commercial design use. All the business cards are the standard 85mm by 55mm. All you need to is change the details on the business card, in order to match your details ensure its print ready and send to print.

Another great month compact with lots of Photoshop and illustrator tutorials worth getting teeth sunk into, as well as some web related articles which are a must read. I hope you enjoy the monthly round-up, and would love to hear your thoughts in comments section.